Breaking the limit

I have never been all that good at sticking to speed limits – Sheila will be happy to confirm this for you if you find it hard to believe, but most people who know me would not be surprised.  It is remarkable, therefore, that the only speeding ticket I have ever had was one that was earned by my daughter’s ex-husband, whilst borrowing my car when we lived in Zululand.  I wasn’t even in the car!  But, having gone back to England following their visit, I had to pay the darn thing.

I suppose I belong to that ridiculous group of people who need to know if the maker’s claims for the vehicle can really be reached.  If it says it has a top speed of a zillion miles an hour – I have to see if it really does.  When I first ventured into motorbikes, I bought a Honda 90, which was the smallest bike you could take on a motorway, and they had just built the M40 motorway in England, which went from Paddington Westway out to Oxford.  That was an exciting journey in winter with everything else on the motorway passing you (except milk-carts) and cross-winds threatening you with unscheduled airborne sections as the bike was so light.

My friend in medical school at the time borrowed big bucks from his older brother (which I doubt he paid back) and bought himself one of the first ever four cylinder bikes – the Honda 500/4 – which went like sh*t out of a greased goose.

It was really hard to keep up – even in traffic – and quite impossible on the open road.  But I had my little Honda 90 screaming its tiny heart out as I hit the 45 angle on the roundabouts, barely missing the foot rests scraping the tarmac and ending up as roadkill.

I graduated as soon as I could to a Honda 360 – but once you’ve got the feel of biking and know how to control your machine, you just have to go bigger and faster.  From the 360 to a Suzuki 550 – which was a nasty, whining, halfway-to-nothing bike that only served to frustrate me more and more.  I finally had the money to graduate to the acme of motorbikes, and bought a BMW 1100 tourer.

This was a beautiful bike, and gave Sheila and me a lot of fun and pleasure.  We shot off on the ferry from Portsmouth one long weekend, and motored down the west coast of France to Bordeaux and back – effortlessly, with two packed panniers and two up, sailing along at a paltry 90 mph, and the bike not even breaking a sweat.  There wasn’t a vehicle on the road to touch us at the lights, and the open road was just that – for us, at least.

In South Africa, I had a BMW 1200 cruiser – a real collector’s item in time to come, I suspect – on which I commuted to work every day.  Sadly, I had to leave it behind when we came to Canada, and a replacement is not viewed with much enthusiasm by the family following our son-in-law’s near fatal crash on his BMW 1300 5 years ago.

So I have to find other limits to push.  And what seems to me to follow naturally in the high-risk category is how far I’m prepared to go for the gospel.  This is particularly so when I find that vast swathes of the world (hundreds of millions of people) are either of another persuasion, and simply don’t know about Jesus – or don’t know enough about him – or they think they know about Jesus, but are being preached an alternative and erroneous gospel that leads them to hell.

I feel that all of us need to push the limits on this topic, if we care about it at all.  Jesus said that we would be pulled over by the speed cops, fined, have our licenses taken away, and so on.  But that didn’t stop the early disciples, it didn’t stop my difficult friend Paul, and it certainly didn’t stop Jesus himself!

We have to be prepared to push our soul-motors to the limit – and then some more – if we are to have any impact on those around us.  It’s not enough to have a big, Harley-Davidson noise, farting along the road, saying, ‘Look at me!  Aren’t I the best?’  That’s no performance at all!  Better to be screaming into the curves on your Honda 90 with folks looking at you and saying, ‘Wow, look at that guy go!  I want to be like that!’

So, break the limit for Jesus – and see what you can do!

 

Philip+

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